In these the early years of the third millennium, women across the world are surmounting barriers in the professions, breaking glass ceilings in the corporate world, and holding their own in the citadels of state government. From Britain to Brazil there are greater numbers of women today functioning in municipal councils, national parliaments and as cabinet ministers. And although to a large extent men are still the dominant principle in all the important corridors of power in the most developed countries, women’s participation in national arenas of governance has trebled over the last three decades.

What, then, hinders the full blossoming of women’s physical, intellectual and artistic capacities? Here, we must acknowledge the significance of the class or caste mechanism in most societies, where, depending on one’s place in the social order, one’s expectations are clearly defined. Obviously, wealthy families in Third World states can afford to give their offspring the quality of education that poor families could only yearn for. The female products of this superior education would naturally gravitate to the kind of occupation that would open doors, which could never be entered by the lower class of women with limited basic education and no skills training.

At certain levels of the job market, women take home far less in pay and emoluments than their male counterparts. Women generally earn less per hour, per day, per week than men. Women workers are less likely than men to be selected for higher training or for promotion. The on-the-job perquisites that are routinely accorded men are withheld from women. When confronted with evidence of gender inequalities, employers are quick to trot out the old and tired arguments that women are more prone to report sick, or cannot be relied upon for certain assignments because of recurrent pregnancies.

In the mid-1990s, the United Nations published a document based upon a study, which concluded that at the current rate of social progress, it would take approximately 450 years for women to be proportionately represented as heads of state or government and parliamentary officials. Since it would be manifestly unfair for half of the world’s populace to wait that long for political emancipation, there began an international groundswell to advocate the nomination of a greater number of women for public office beginning at the community and municipal levels and then moving to senates and parliaments.